On a wall in my city, which was often hidden to the sun, there was a line of the poet Paul Eluard, Nothing could disturb the order of light. It came to my mind when I listened to Markus Reuter‘s Falling for Ascension, with TobiasReber and Sonar band. A work that places the listener in a luminescent and immobile world, where he is the main focus with his meditation. Everything is pervaded by a balance between the light, its order represented by the minimalist discipline, and the stability, the protection from the harm via ecstasy and meditation.

The story of Falling for Ascension begins when Markus Reuter around the age of 14 composes the main themes of the record, we are between 1985 and 1987, crossing 12-tone scales and the King Crimson’s Discipline era. The result then remains unfinished until 2014, more precisely to April 26, when it is recalled for the session with the Swiss minimalist quartet of the Sonar, at the time before their recording of Black Light, and the electronics of TobiasReber. Markus Reuter’s touch guitar completes the lineup. Enter the six tracks Conditional called with the Roman progressive number, all lasting no more than 10 minutes, and the final hypnotic 22-minute Unconditional.

The initial Conditional I starts from a territory which is common and uncommon at the same time: the Sonar guitars, Stephan Thelen and Bernhard Wagner, start a dialogue around a riff built on a D major triad, first in unison then out of phase. It remains the raw and luminescent Sonar sound made of clean guitars that hypnotically interweave, but this time outside the dissonant triton that characterizes the sinister and repetitive landscapes of the group. Markus Reuter builds a rhythmically alternative theme working on dissonant intervals over this landscape. When at 4.50 the two guitars leave the scene, we hear all the delicate power of the rhythm section and Tobias Reber enters to add beautiful atonal intertwining lines.

Before listening to Falling for Ascension, I had the idea that we were facing the missing link of an evolutionary chain. Putting together Sonar, Markus Reuter and Tobias Reber in the same album could have meant bringing postminimalism to a further level. The feeling is confirmed by listening. But it is more surprising that, in reality, this album has remained in the ‘cellar’ for at least three years, as Reuter tells in this 2015 interview on Make Weird Music, perhaps waiting for the right moment. And the release of this work produced by Nik Bartsch‘s Ronin Rhythm Records seems to fall in the perfect moment now. Pocked at a crucial moment in the creativity of Markus Reuter – just to mention the last Lighthouse for MoonJune – and the next Sonar work, which will be released in the spring of 2018 for RareNoise, produced by David Torn.

Slowly in the transition between Conditional II and Conditional III we move from a tonal environment to atonality: the second track is built on the semitone movement of a minor third riff. In the third one, therefore, the rhythm slows down so much that it shifts attention to the soundscape without Reuter’s goal. The listener has the impression of the spiral movement of the DNA, while the parallel and opposite motion of the guitars exploits all 12 semitones of the scale once again.

As Markus Reuter explains, the product of those tracks is not originated from a score already written, but from a work that has combined writing with compositional techniques that recall the avant-gardes of the ’50s and ’60s of the last century: “Every musician has had the freedom to decide when to move to the next step, regardless of the others The choice was limited to ‘when’ not to ‘what’ There is one specific thing that is required, but you can decide when to move to the next element of the series “. The reference to the score of In C by Terry Riley, as of many works of minimalism and not is immediate.

There is a deep connection between the compositional techniques that incorporate the alea and improvisation and on the other side the changes in the music of the last century triggered by Cage. The author loses the link with his work, giving life to what Michel Imberty calls paradoxical creation [in Improvvisazione oggi, A, Sbordoni, LIM]: “Not to be the author of your dreams, to escape from yourself as a subject that acts , creates, composes, this malaise as a rejection of the romantic ideal of the creative genius nourishes gradually the ever greater part of improvisation in musical creation “.

What in the classical avant-garde was an exploration of the alea, of the randomness, by the composer, here becomes a spiraling journey in hypnosis. Markus Reuter’s music is profoundly influenced by a psychological approach: he finds himself in the trance of his last orchestral work, Sun Trance, or in the previous Todmorden-513; in the practice of opening soundscapes at his concerts; in collaborations. And especially in his musical vision – Markus often repeats in his interviews that human being is a ‘pattern recognition machine’. Psychological aspect that Nik Bartsch emphasizes in the notes of the work: “What we hear is the materialization of an abstract visionary mind that can dance”.

As we move between Conditional IV and Conditional V, we lose any point of contact with the concept of tonality and cadence. Music has not goal, but is transformed into a labyrinth that reveals new ways at each listening. Conditional VI resumes, even more slowly, the theme of the second track. The weaves seem almost to increase, Christian Kuntner’s bass becomes more incisive and closely follows the surgical drumming of ManuelPasquinelli. This prepares for the final ritual of Unconditional: a hypnotic, psychedelic riff increases the pressure. This time the abstract gives way to the ritual dance, almost shamanic.

The ritual dimension is the point of contact between this slow and hypnotic minimalism and the Nik Bartsch’s zen funk. But the main character is the listener still, who in fact reshapes the music, treating the work as an open work, “drawing the work itself” to resume the words of Markus Reuter again. Those words recall once again those of Imberty: “The composer creates the work not to have it done, but so that remains to be done (…) This destruction of the link between the works and its creator explains therefore a whole series of mutations of roles in musical activity (composer, performer, listener) that become interchangeable, no longer mutually exclusive roles, but, according to Dider Anzieu, permutable along an endless circle“. Still the spiral.